October 15

October 15 is the 289th day of the year, and the American record for it runs from 1781 to 2018 — a span of 237 years. The entry that anchors it: American Civil War, 1864.

The revolutionary generation left its own mark on the date. In 1781, the Battle of Raft Swamp marks the last battle fought in North Carolina during the American Revolutionary War with a Patriot victory. It occurred four days before the British surrender at Yorktown.

The antebellum decades brought the date closer to the country’s central argument. In 1864, American Civil War — Confederate forces captured Glasgow, Missouri, although it had little long-term benefit as Price's Missouri Expedition was defeated a week later.

The early twentieth century brought industry, air travel and war to the date. In 1910, Airship America is launched from New Jersey in the first attempt to cross the Atlantic by a powered aircraft. Then, in 1928, the airship Graf Zeppelin completes its first trans-Atlantic flight, landing at Lakehurst, New Jersey, United States.

After 1945 the date reflects a country operating at global scale. In 1954, Hurricane Hazel made landfall in the Carolinas in the United States before moving north to Toronto in Canada later the same day, killing 176 people in the two countries.

The most recent entries fall within living memory. In 1994, the United States, under the Clinton administration, returns Haiti's first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to the island. Seven years on, in 2001, NASA's Galileo spacecraft passes within 112 miles (180 km) of Jupiter's moon Io. Then, in 2018, 13-year-old American girl, Jayme Closs, is kidnapped from her Barron, Wisconsin home after her parents were both murdered.

The date is also a birthday. Among the Americans born on October 15: Samuel Adams Holyoke (1762), American composer and educator; Asaph Hall (1829), American astronomer and academic; John L. Sullivan (1858), American boxer, actor, and journalist; Charles W. Clark (1865), American singer and educator; and Jane Darwell (1879), American actress.

October 15 is also a date of endings. Among the Americans who died on it: Alfred Moore (1810), American captain and judge; Stanley Ketchel (1910), American boxer; Herbert Henry Dow (1930), Canadian-American businessman, founded the Dow Chemical Company; and Edythe Chapman (1948), American actress.

The date carries formal observance as well — National Latino AIDS Awareness Day (United States). What holds these 8 entries together is nothing more than the calendar, and nothing less. 237 years separate the earliest from the latest, and each was once simply the present day.